Six Questions interview #61 : Andrea Thompson

Andrea Thompson has been publishing and performing her work for over twenty-five years. In 2005 her spoken word album, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award, in 2009 she was the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word’s Poet of Honour, and in 2019 her poetry album, Soulorations helped earn her the League of Canadian Poets’ Golden Beret Award. Thompson is co-author of the anthology, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, and author of the novel, Over Our Heads. Thompson currently teaches through Workman Arts, CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health), and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She is a member of the Brick Books editorial collective and curator for Brick's multimedia hub, Brickyard. www.andreathompson.ca Instagram: andreathompsonpoet

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I moved to Ottawa in 1985 as an 18 year old and lived there for six years. I first visited the city about four years before, on a trip with my junior high school class. We stayed in an empty dorm of Carleton University, and during that trip I fell in love with the city. I remember walking around the campus thinking: this is where I’m going to go to school someday. Years later, Carlton was at the top of my list when I sent in my university applications. I was over the moon when I got the acceptance to go to the best school in Canada to study journalism.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

Sometime during my first year at Carleton, I experienced a kind of academic/vocational crisis. I remember we had been studying the ownership structure of the Canadian media and learning about how most of the newspapers in the country were owned by Conrad Black. Suddenly I was struck with the realization that as a journalist, I wouldn’t be writing what I believed to be truth, I would be writing whatever Mr. Black wanted me to. This left me feeling a deep sense of discouragement and lack of direction for a while – followed by an incredible sense of freedom, as I had never actually had a burning desire to study journalism at all.

What I really wanted to be was a poet, but that had seemed ridiculous when I was in high school. How could I ever buy groceries and pay rent by writing poems? If I was going to be a writer, I believed that journalism would provide me with a modicum of financial security. But if I couldn’t use language to tell the truth, I thought, what was the point of writing at all? So that moment of existential crisis became a blessing in disguise. I gave up on majoring in practicality and switched to my true passion: creative writing.

It was in one of my poetry classes that I met a wonderful young writer named Missy Marston. Throughout my time in Ottawa, Missy and I became close friends – we’d go to the pub and spend hours sharing stories and poems, we’d write together at each other’s apartments and offer each other encouragement. I was in awe of Missy. To me, she was not only talented and inspiring, but fearless. I remember feeling daunted by the thought of sending work out to journals to try to get published – which in the days before internet involved a lot of waiting by the mailbox. Missy contextualized the whole experience as an adventure, telling me that getting rejection letters was just a part of the process, and a testament that we had become ‘real’ writers. That perspective set me free. It’s something I think of often, and a story I pass on to my students as well.

Q: What did you see happening here that you didn’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

I loved living in Ottawa. I stayed there for six years, living on campus at first, then on Bronson Ave and later on 3^rd Ave in the Glebe. The Glebe was a wonderful place to live in those days. It was a lot more affordable than it is now, and full of artists and students. There was a real sense of community in the arts scene. As a smaller city, I think Ottawa provided a great sense of cohesion – everyone seemed to knew each other. But it also had the benefit of being close to bigger cities as well. I remember taking regular trips to Toronto, Montreal and New York when I lived in Ottawa, and enjoying spending time in these nearby big cities, then coming home to a place where the pace of life was less frenetic.

Back in those days, I used to work at a restaurant in the Glebe called, Mexicali Rosa’s and my boyfriend, Frank worked as a bartender at Irene’s Pub next door. Oh, how I loved Irene’s! Everyone – from the staff to patrons, to Irene herself and Lonesome Paul, the country singer who played guitar every Sunday night – was a larger-than-life character. I spent many afternoons sitting in that pub writing, and feeling like I was a part of a cool, creative community.

One thing that loved about Irene’s, and Mexi’s and The Five Fifteen down the street, is that people of all ages hung out together. Same as the Chateau Lafayette downtown, where college kids would drink Labatt’s 50 along side wizened old men. Everyone, of all ages gathered together at the local watering hole in those days in Ottawa. It reminded me of the pubs in the UK, and created a cross-generational sense of community that I haven’t really experienced since.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

A few of my poems feature moments in Ottawa, but I’d like to write about the city through fiction as well. I have an idea for a novel that I’ve been brewing that I’d love to set in Ottawa back in the late 80s and early 90s. I think that was a wonderful time in the city and I’d love to capture some of the essence of what I experienced. I will always think of Ottawa as the place where I graduated from being a teenager to becoming an adult. It was Ottawa that introduced me to my first writing peers and in Ottawa where I published my first poem – in the Carleton Literary Review.

I feel indebted to Ottawa for introducing me to the idea that it was possible to be a full time artist. Some of my friends were painters and dancers and musicians as well as writers, and all of them showed me that art didn’t have to be something you did with what was left over of your time – that it was possible to place the act of creation in the centre of your life.

Q: What are you working on now?

Right now I’m in the process of editing a poetry collection called A Selected History of Soul Speak that will be out later this fall as a part of Frontenac House’s Quintet series. I’m also working on another collection of poetry that I’m hoping to send off this spring, and am doing research for an upcoming spoken word album exploring the Black gospel tradition.

Six Questions interview #60 : Wanda Praamsma

Wanda Praamsma is a poet and writer based in Kingston, Ontario. Her first book of poetry, a thin line between, was published by Book*hug in 2014, and poems have appeared in periodicities, Ottawater, eleven eleven, Lemon Hound, and The Feathertale Review.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I grew up in the Ottawa Valley, in the village of Clayton, near Almonte. So I was there for those 18 years, and then returned periodically, and lived in the city proper for brief periods, while flitting between jobs in Toronto and Ottawa, and travelling/working in South America and Europe. I initially left the area for university, to study journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax, and then I went on this winding journey before ending up where I am now, in Kingston, Ontario.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I started off as a journalist, writing for the local papers in Almonte (the Gazette & The Humm) in high school, and after university, the Montreal Gazette, the Santiago Times (in Chile), and then the Toronto Star, where I was an editor for several years. I always felt like a bit of an outsider in the journalism world, though, and started writing poetry while living abroad and in Toronto. I ultimately left the Star to pursue poetry (and writing in general), and wrote my first book, a thin line between (Book*hug, 2014) while living in Amsterdam for eight months. When I came back to Canada, I started working at Queen’s University and I met poet Phil Hall in 2012, while he was writer-in-residence in the English Department. Phil was very helpful in bringing me into the writing community in Ontario, and he introduced me to Jay and Hazel Millar at Book*hug in Toronto, and to writers in Ottawa, including rob mclennan, who published my first broadside through above/ground press, and poems appeared in ottawater and seventeen seconds. Since then, I’ve been in and out of Ottawa for events and readings, although having two kids, one in 2014 and the next in 2017, has kept me mostly in Kingston these past few years.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?

I think being part of the community of writers and artists in Ottawa and the surrounding area has given me a writing home, through early encouragement from teachers in Almonte and the support of my parents and their vast network of artistic friends (they are both potters and my mom runs the Almonte Potters Guild), to my later involvment in the writing community in Ottawa through poetry and publishing my first book.

Because I started off in journalism, and worked mostly as an editor, there is continual movement in me toward holding the writing and the poetry as the needed thing, holding it as the most important thing. I guess what I mean is, journalism leans so much to the outer world, the practical, the real, and poetry, for me, can lean in so many different directions, to the inner self, the surreal, the obscure, and what’s viewed as impractical. I often need to re-direct myself to the non-linear world and ways of thinking, because it is where I feel most at home, and the Ottawa writing and art community always supports this re-direction.

But leaving, leaving my home terrain and the Canadian shield landscape of my childhood is also crucial to my thoughts on writing and the words themselves. I like to be away, for perspective, and Amsterdam has always been a magical place for me. I grew up here in Canada but my family is Dutch and all of my extended family is in Holland. So when I am there, I get to go to a deeper part of myself, the part that lingers in the Dutch language I know from my parents, and I feel a sense of belonging that I don’t always have in Canada. I find a different internal rhythm there, and through that, my writing seems to thrive.

As for Kingston – living here (and on Wolfe Island, where we were based for a couple of years) has been about grounding and staying, growing a family and a greater sense of home and community, and that is definitely reflected in my poems and writing of the past few years.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

I think there is such strength and connectedness and loyalty within the Ottawa poetry community. There is an openness and willingness to embrace all writers, at whatever stage they are at, and to support them as much as possible. I think there is a similar strength in community in Kingston, but I also feel I have been living in a cave these past few years, taking care of small children and working other jobs to survive, and so I have not been an overly active member of any writing community recently. But I do know that the Ottawa and area poets are always welcoming whenever I have had the energy to put myself out there and publish these past few years. The forward momentum and encouragement is always helpful and inspiring.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

In terms of writing engagements, such as events and readings, I don’t feel my writing has directly responded to those, but definitely, my connections to poets and writers living in Ottawa and the area, and my lifelong connection to the landscape of my childhood and the people in it, have changed my approaches to writing and to my current projects. I think, in terms of my poetry, it’s about edges and openings – finding my edges to walk, and finding the openings to walk through, to see myself and my obsessions more clearly. Many poets/writers/artists working in the area – Pearl Pirie, Phil Hall, Sandra Ridley, rob mclennan, Elizabeth Hay, to name a few – push me in new directions, and ask questions that I wouldn’t otherwise know to ask. And when it comes to what I write about and how I write it, of course my childhood underpins everything. The roads between my home village of Clayton and Ottawa, and the roads between Ottawa/Clayton and Kingston, are the foundation of all the maps I work from. In my book, a thin line between, I write about Highway 10, which runs from Kingston to Perth:

the road slows and the bends make driving 100 kilometres per hour impossible
so we gear up and we gear down and sometimes we pretend we are on a racetrack
except then you miss the views
the lakes with lilies
the evergreens ever green
the quiet quilt of a forest white

So, for me, this connection between where I am now, and where I was then, is ever-present.

And, I believe, there is a great link between the poets here in Kingston and the community in Ottawa, and I am glad that I somehow fit within and between the two.

Q: What are you working on now?

I am working on another book of poems, circling around mothering, and the deconstruction of self and fixed realities that goes along with it. I am also working on a novel that follows three women-artist-mothers through three generations (post-World War II onwards), zeroing in on their abilities to confront and be bold in their choices – in essence, how to be themselves and be recognized – in a society that doesn’t willingly acknowledge their contributions.

 

Six Questions interview #59 : Colin Browne

Colin Browne’s most recent book of poetry, Here, was published by Talonbooks in September 2020. His extended essay, Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw (Talonbooks, 2016), is a poetic exploration of three argillite platters made by Haida artist Da.a xiigang (Charles Edenshaw) between 1885-1895. In 2018, Browne and composer Alfredo Santa Ana collaborated on the creation of Music for a Night in May, three new works for string quartet, soprano, and spoken voice, presented at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. He was the guest curator in 2016 for the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia, a show that featured the largest number of Paalen’s paintings ever exhibited in Canada. He has recently written catalogue essays for exhibitions in New York and Vienna that reflect on the history and legacy of the Surrealist engagement with the ceremonial and monumental arts of the Northwest Coast. Browne is currently working on a book about Wolfgang Paalen’s 1939 journey from Alaska to Victoria, and a new collaboration with composer Alfredo Santa Ana, Aves: The Four Chambered Heart, for countertenor, flute, cello, and poet.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away? 

From 1950 to 1952 we lived on Rideau Terrace in Ottawa, and for several months I attended Libby Miller’s nursery school on Elgin Street, close to downtown. It was notable for having a surplus of triangles and only one drum. I remember my mother ironing while we listened to a solemn broadcast of the coronation on CBC Radio. After moving to Halifax, our family would drive to Ottawa each year to spend a week or two with my grandmother on Delaware Avenue. In 1954 I spent almost two months in a Grade Three class at Elgin Street Public School and walked home a different way each day. The kitchen in the Delaware Avenue house smelled of clove and cinnamon and old wood. The attic walls and ceiling had been decorated with extravagant theatrical paintings and the trunks contained fabulous clothes from the 1930s. My Dad had lived in this house as a young man before WW II, and had said goodbye to it, as his older brother had, when he went to sea in 1939.

On one of our summer visits, I made a friend across the street, Willie. With three sisters, dinner at his house was always lots of fun. My top literary experience in Ottawa was thanks to the youngest of these wonderful sisters. She’d managed to acquire a forbidden copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and Willie had discovered it. When it went missing, she confronted him, demanding that he give it back. Naturally he refused. After a major battle he ran with it down to the Rideau Canal and heaved it into the water. As he was walking back up the street, our dusty, sticky car pulled into my grandmother’s driveway. We had just arrived from Nova Scotia. I leapt out and ran to Willie. His sister was fuming and shouting in the doorway of his house. His mother was calling him for dinner. He grabbed me and, in desperate whispers, delivered a solemn request. I had to promise I’d run down to the canal and recover the book. Nothing in our lives would ever be more important than this. I took off. Glancing back, I could see Willie being led into his house like a prisoner. My mother was calling me to help empty the car.

The current was running swiftly and the water in the canal was murky. In despair I saw nothing that looked like a book. I began to run in the direction of the current, block after block, or so it seemed. Then, there it was, hurrying down the middle of the canal, white, half submerged. It was impossible to reach, even if I had a stick, and I didn’t. I was a boy from Nova Scotia. Where would I find a stick in Ottawa? I came to a bridge, ran up the steps and out to the middle of the span. It was growing dark. Cars were turning on their lights. Looking down into the current, I could see the book coming my way, and as it approached it began to sink. Just below me it dropped out of sight like a wounded bird.

My grandmother passionately loved grand opera, movies, and poetry, weaknesses no other family members shared. When we passed in the hall, she’d cry out to me in a reedy, dramatic voice, “Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert…!” She lived alone, and I suspect that much of each day was spent in daydreams in which she was Violetta, or Mimi, or perhaps Vivien Leigh, who also died of consumption—in the summer of Expo 67. My grandmother and I were among the first to attend a screening of Ben Hur at the Rideau Theatre. I mostly remember the horses. But I do know that the last two writers on the show, which was banned in China, were Gore Vidal and Christopher Fry, both uncredited.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here? 

It was in Ottawa that I wrote my first published poem. We had moved from Halifax to Ottawa in 1958 and found our own house. In the spring of 1960, the school yearbook published my poem “Rockin’Var,” a parody of Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lochinvar.” I’d recently been introduced to jazz and was deeply committed to the lingo. The cool cat who rescues “groovy Ellen” from the wedding whisks her away in a Jaguar XK-E. It has just occurred to me that the parody owes quite a bit to Mad magazine. I was apparently a runner-up that year in the poetry-reading contest. The following year we moved to Victoria, B.C.

Q: What are you working on now? 

I’m working on a couple of projects at the moment. My new book of poetry, Here, was published by Talonbooks last fall. I’ve just completed the first draft of an account of the journey down the Northwest Coast during the summer of 1939 by the surrealist artist and writer Wolfgang Paalen, his wife Alice Rahon, a poet and artist, and the third partner in their marriage, Eva Sulzer, who took photographs. It tracks their trip from Paris to New York to Ottawa and parts west. Their travels took them through southern Alaska, up the Skeena River, and down the B.C. coast to Victoria where they met Emily Carr. Like many of the surrealists, Paalen was deeply attracted to the achievements of Northwest Coast monumental and ceremonial artists. Being a surrealist and the son of a Jewish father, he could not return to Europe, and at the end of the summer the three settled in Mexico City where, for the following decade, Paalen’s production as an artist, collector, curator, researcher, essayist, scholar, poet, playwright, and editor of arguably the best art magazine of the 1940s, was nothing less than astonishing. I hope I can be true to the nature of that transformative journey and its aftermath. I’m also excited to be collaborating again with my composer friend, Alfredo Santa Ana, on a new piece for countertenor, flute, cello, and poet, called Aves, The Four-Chambered Heart. I’ve been writing text and we’ve just had our first formal meeting. We’re hoping to workshop the piece with our musicians in May, and premiere it next year, with any luck, before a live audience.

Vancouver, 20 January 2021

Six Questions interview #58 : Rachel Small

Rachel Small is based outside of Ottawa, and is exactly one half of Splintered Disorder Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines including Thorn Literary Magazine, blood orange, The Hellebore, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Shore, bywords, and other places. You can find her on twitter @rahel_taller.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? 

I grew up an hour outside of Ottawa and came originally for a BA in history and English at Carleton University. Afterwards, I went to Algonquin College for a diploma in professional writing. I spent five years living properly in Ottawa, and since I’ve been running back and forth from the country.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here? 

I always wrote little short stories with a vague dream of one day writing a novel, but wasn’t really devoted to the idea of it. During my second year, I got sick with mono and ended up dropping a few classes to cope. I had to pick a few summer classes and got lucky with a creative writing workshop which I ended up loving, and it inspired me. I began looking at writing programs to follow up with after graduation, as history was burning me out.

It was until I took professional writing that I stumbled into the writing community. I didn’t really understand the process of submitting work until I had written a series of poems for a class final assignment and was recommended to start a Twitter profile. I used to hate that platform until I realized how essential it was connecting with other writers and small press magazines. I was finding people with similar interests and different interests, and that was how I ended up stumbling into the Ottawa writing community.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?  

I used to obsess over what I was writing and what people would want to read. When I began blog writing, I was able to write exactly what I wanted to say. Voices in the Attic was my first collaborative experience which led from grass roots design to planning trips. I got to collaborate and risk ideas, which was a huge stepping stone for someone who suffers an insufferable level of shyness.

I also benefited from seeing what impacted their writing. I came from a small rural town with my own personal life experience. It was different, mixing with other writers with different backgrounds.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow? 

Ottawa is exceptionally kind. I’ve been given more opportunities here than I have found elsewhere. I haven’t experienced much beyond Ottawa, so I can’t say for sure what is happening elsewhere, but Ottawa has a taste for the arts. There are so many platforms that support beginning to experienced writers, and it offers plenty of chances to learn.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work? 

I love Ottawa. It is where I learned to swing dance and to write. I spent the last few summers working at different Ottawa farmers markets, which is how I got to discover some of the corners of the city. I went through some of the best moments of my life here, which is why I always think of it as my home.

I’m trying to connect more with the city in my writing, which is mostly by connecting the rural lines to urban. I’ve been keeping my distance due to COVID-19, so looking at other writers within the community gives me a little bit of nostalgia.

Q: What are you working on now?

I was working on a series of true crime poems I put on hold recently. Lately I’ve been devoted to a fantasy novel I’m still in the beginning stages. During early lockdown, I picked up some books that my friends loved reading, which were all fantasy and not the typical genre I would usually go for. But, I ended up loving it, and it’s shifted my writing style over.

I’m also working on a publishing adventure with a friend I met in university.

During nights when I’m flipping my schedule over for shift work, I have been working on a small series of poetry based on the body and isolation, as well as connection to environment and labour.